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Here's how it works in my county:

1) The voter checks in giving his name and address.
2) Once identity is verified, a barcode sticker containing the voter's id and other data is peeled off the registry and attached to a Request for Ballot form.
3) The voter takes the ballot request form to another station where he is issued a ballot. The serial number on the ballot is written on the Request for Ballot form.
Presto! They know who voted, and for whom.

On another note, a couple of years ago I was number two in line to vote at my precinct. When my ballot went into the vote-counting machine, it was registered as the 32nd ballot. When I inquired about it, I was escorted, rather roughly out of the building. A local cop followed me out of the parking lot. He peeled off after realizing I was leading him straight to the Police Department parking lot.

Just now jumping into this discussion. You say where you vote each paper ballot is identifiable as to the particular voter who cast it? Are you certain of that? That sure would do away with the concept of a secret ballot, no?

Where I vote, they take your name and address (and soon a picture id) and verify that I’m registered to vote in that district. We then take a paper ballot from the stack, and vote, or we go to an electronic machine and vote. They aren’t supposed to know who cast votes for whom.

And in a primary election where both parties have primaries, we choose either a Dem or GOP ballot from the two they give us, vote on one of them and discard the other one, so we can vote in whichever primary we want, but only in one. Again, no record is kept as to which primary we voted in, only that we voted.

If that’s the way it is in Mississippi, it will be impossible to tell a) if a person had voted in the Dem primary on June 3rd (He might have voted GOP), and b) who they voted for on June 24th in the runoff (since ballots are secret.)

Granted, if their name shows up on a Democrat Poll Watcher’s list, he probably voted Dem on June 3rd and shouldn’t have voted June 24th. Also granted, if he did vote anyway, he probably voted for Cochran.

So, Cochran possibly stole the election, but it’s not going to be simple to demonstrate conclusively, I suspect. You would have to interview individual voters, and get them to tell you that they a) voted Dem on June 3, and b) voted Cochran on June 24th. A judge with a healthy respect for statistics might overturn the election if 100 or so voters were interviewed and nearly all of them voted illegally, and it could then be also shown that there were 10,000 or more such situations, but it’s a real stretch that would all happen.